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Now that the 2008 US Presidential and Congressional elections are behind us, what can we expect from the new Administration and the 111th Congress on Cyber Security? The Speaking of Security podcast has a report direct from Washington, DC.

What a refreshing conversation it was—a Global 100 bank’s senior
IT executive was gushing on how he was in the money. No, really! And even better,
amidst today’s financial fiascos, he had selected to tell me about how
he was financially ahead by deploying some state-of-art security solutions.

In response to the complex and global threats faced by the cardholder ecosystem, Visa Inc recently announced worldwide deadlines for PCI DSS Compliance.  "Compliance with PCI DSS is vital to ensuring the integrity of the global payments
system," said Eduardo Perez, head of global data security, Visa Inc.  "Aligning
compliance programs across the Visa regions is the latest step in our commitment
to safeguarding cardholder data."

I attended RSA Conference Europe late last month, which – as always – is an amazing event. The theme of the Conference was focused on Alan Turing,
who is often called the father of modern computer science. One particular perk
at the venue was the public display of the Enigma
machine – believed by the German forces during WWII to be impenetrable.

We’ve been getting a good few questions recently about how many Events
Per Second a SIEM product support. Well, that depends on a few factors:

• The transport – processing Syslog events takes up
  a heck of a lot less processing power than collecting from a Windows box.
  Same with collecting data over an ODBC connection.

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This week’s Speaking of Security podcast features an on-the-scene report from the Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit, one of the key shows on the security event calendar. The Summit was held last week in Orlando, Florida.

RSA has marked a McDonald’s-like landmark, quietly— over one billion applications and devices are now embedded with RSA ® BSAFE® security software. No numbers changed under ubiquitous golden arches to mark this monumental achievement, but it did get me thinking on how deep an impact RSA BSAFE has had in the broad industry sectors as well as at EMC in particular…

Given the seriousness of the financial crisis, growing job losses and the continued meltdown of global stock markets, it’s hard to imagine that the incoming Obama Administration or new U.S. Congress will be able to focus on much else during the first several months of 2009.  When they do tackle other issues, healthcare reform, tax policy and energy policy are likely to emerge at the top along with national security priorities.  Not to mention that many FY2009 spending bills still need to be approved by Congress and signed by the President as well, although that is expected to happen by March 2009 at the latest.

So where does this leave cyber security issues? 

Governments and law enforcement agencies from North America and Europe continue to increase cooperation and coordination to combat the growing threats of cyber-crime and e-espionage.  That was quite evident at the recent RSA Conference Europe that was held in London as a significant number of representatives from governments participated in panels and other events.   I moderated one of those sessions, which was titled “Tackling Cyber-crime and Protecting Critical Information Infrastructure – Public Sector Approaches&rdquo…

In recent security briefings, I’m often asked: “Should I protect sensitive information on my laptop by encrypting my laptop?”

My advice is to first ask WHY?  Why do you as an employee have the business or security justification to transfer and store sensitive PII: (personally identifiable information) onto your mobile device?   (A little of asking who, what, where and when about your information will help here too).

Innovation in Security is a theme that we at EMC and RSA strongly believe in— it was central to my keynote speech at the NCA Security and Technology Conference in Seattle on the 29th of October. Yet, as the day progressed, I could not help but think of how extensively we need to innovate in our security deployments, to enable vibrant new information exchange capabilities, and to sustain the rapid changes in our information-centric lifestyles.

And are we being hit with Change!
Carlos Dominguez, the SVP at Cisco, spoke to the profound impact of Web 2.0 and TelePresence [TP] technologies on our business and social lifestyles…

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In today’s Speaking of Security Podcast we’re talking to RSA customer, Kurt Roussell, Manager, Revenue Protection at We Energies (a subsidiary of Wisconsin Energy). Kurt discusses his strategies for thwarting identity theft at We Energies and his approach to the new FACTA regulations.

I recently visited a customer and we had an in-depth conversation about the use of DLP in a large corporate environment. The customer agreed that the technology surrounding DLP is great and that it would definitely help identify potential rogue employees.  However, the customer also expressed concerns about when is enough…enough.

Even though we’re a technology vendor, we always stress that, when considering the robustness of your information security strategy, technology isn’t always the answer. It’s upon the effective combination of people, process and technology that we must ultimately rely. That’s why it pained me when this story appeared in the UK press last weekend…

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This Web site was created to be a clearing house for technical IT security queries, and we are still fielding quite a few of those. But we continue to receive a broad variety of fascinating questions …

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